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It's as American as apple pie or getting in a fistfight over a chicken sandwich. And it's especially American now that the president is a ninja level. Donald Trump lies so often that even his biggest lies can get lost in the fray. This is these American lies. Have you ever told a lie? Let's admit it, we all have just this morning I was talking to the doorman at my co-op and he said, Michael, do you know my name?

And I said, Of course I know your name. Don't be silly. In reality, I have no idea what my doorman's name is.

I think it's something Italian like Credenza or Garba Ghoul, so I lied to him. Today's show is about lies.

People lie about all sorts of things. They lie about their age. They lie about their weight.

They lie about their whereabouts the night their neighbors charcoal grill went missing.

But some people lie more often than others. One of those people is the president. And we're going to look at one of his biggest whoppers, the three to five million people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

From WTS in New York, I'm Michael Costa. And Credenza, if you're listening, I apologize for not knowing your name. Buddy, you're listening to The Daily Show presents these American lies.

Part one, what's three to five million illegal voters among friends, I'm here with producer Desi Leida Desi. It's been a while.

I saw you on Saturday. You crashed your car into my mailbox.

So you're here to talk about the voter fraud lie, right? The lie this week is that three to five million people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

What do people know about this? No, it's a lie. Cast were on these American lies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

OK, so the voter fraud lie is still important today. Republicans use fears of voter fraud to restrict voting. We've seen it in swing states like Georgia, Virginia and Wisconsin, where 200000 people were recently purged from the voter rolls by circuit judge. And to understand this lie, you really have to know about this guy.

Donald Trump named Donald Trump has lived a pretty incredible life.

He's been a real estate developer, a mail order steak salesman, a two time Emmy loser. And in 2016, he became the president of the United States.

It is now official Donald Trump has won the Electoral College. Now, most people would be happy to win the presidency, but for Trump, winning wasn't enough.

Donald Trump won with 306 electoral votes, even though Hillary Clinton got nearly two and a half million more popular votes.

Trump won the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote.

So it's like he won the lottery, but only because he stole the winning ticket from a 7-Eleven cashier.

No, not at all. Hmm. Tell me more about that.

Trump won the election even though he got almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. And he got to understand Donald Trump has a fragile ego. At his Comedy Central roast in 2011, he told the comedians who were roasting him there was one thing they couldn't make fun of. Do you know what that was?

His enormous ass, his wealth.

He's got thin skin, especially when it comes to having less than others. So rather than admit he won fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, Trump did what came naturally to him.

He lied. He told members of Congress that maybe three to five million people voted illegally in the most recent presidential election.

It's a claim the president repeated during his first official White House meeting with congressional leaders, telling them he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because millions of illegal ballots were cast. The same claim he made on Twitter after his win, saying, I won the popular vote. If you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally, I won the popular vote.

If you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally, it's a stunning claim, right?

It's kind of like saying I wanted Scrabble, but only because I kicked my opponent in the crotch.

I can do the rest of the story myself. If you just want to take off. Great. I'm going to go microwave a taco.

Every lie starts somewhere. And this American life was born in one of the birthplaces of American democracy, Long Island, Massachusetts.

Oh, my God. No, I like them at the state, flowers at Dunkin Donuts, Coffee Bean and the state song is an Irish guy puking outside a baseball stadium.

And now this state has another claim to fame.

A professor whose work inadvertently ignited the voter fraud controversy, Brian Shaffner, one of the academics behind the study, told CNN Trump is misinterpreting the study, calling Trump's claims absurd and not even plausible.

I'm Brian Shaffner. This is Brian Schaffner. I'm professor of political science at Tufts University.

He's a professor of political science at Tufts University. Why are you repeating everything I say?

Sharpton is a smart guy, even if he doesn't know how podcasts work.

I'm a principal investigator for the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which is a data set that has caused all these problems every election year.

Shatner's group surveys Internet users about their political views. The survey doesn't specifically ask about voter fraud.

And yet there's a question included in the survey that's not really meant to look for noncitizens. But there's a misperception the respondents can select. They would identify them as noncitizens, and that essentially led to this big controversy. There were over 30000 respondents to the survey in 2008, and among that group there, a little over 300 who identified themselves as noncitizens when they responded to the survey. Thirty eight of those supposed non-citizens claimed to have voted.

So we've got this Internet survey taken in 2008. Now, flash forward from 2006 that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois will be the next president of the United States.

He defeated 2014 30 year old Jeremy Meeks, also known as the hot felon, because that's when this data set evolves from a curiosity to a flaming political hot potato.

This episode of These American Lives is brought to you by Warby Snarkier, do you find it difficult to come up with the perfect quip when you're bantering with your friends? Try Warby snarkier.

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Hi, everyone. We're back with part two, a ruffly and I just wanted to say for anyone listening at home for the next part of our podcast contains severe profanity in extreme graphic descriptions of sex acts.

What? No, it doesn't.

If you're listening with your children, you better turn it off unless you want those kids to grow up fast. Just ignore him. OK, so it's 2014. Jesse Richman, a researcher at Old Dominion University, or ODU, comes across the survey. Richmond takes the responses to that final question about being a citizen and extrapolates that anywhere between 38000 and 2.8 million non-citizens voted in 2008. There's only one problem with Jesse Richman's conclusion.

Jesse Richman has been dead for 50 years. Uh, no. Here's Brian Schaffner revisiting his 2008 survey that became the basis for Richman's work.

We did a study where we actually recontacted the people who had claimed to be non-citizens and a lot of them when we asked the same question, again, change their answer. And among the people who actually claim to be noncitizens, both times we asked, none of them were voters, none of them.

Brian Schaffner had renounced his own findings. But by this time, it's too late. Right wing media members are using the ODU survey to claim that voter fraud is an enormous problem, even though it's based on one study's interpretation of a flawed data set.

So I guess, Desie, just one question remains, right? How did this lie get to Trump?

Oh, I was going to ask, is 15 minutes in the microwave too long for a single taco? But that's good to your questions. Good one.

So it turns out Trump may have been turned on to voter fraud in his natural habitat for a golf course.

Five days after Trump's inauguration, he hosted a dinner for Republicans and Democrats. He tells his guests that he would have won the popular vote if it hadn't been for the three to five million illegal votes. So according to The New York Times, a Democrat at the dinner asked Trump, where are you getting this information? And Trump cites a guy named Bernard longer.

Oh, I loved him. And Das Boot Bernard Longer is a German professional golfer.

He won the Masters twice and he's not often. You smile after a minute, but you can if you are in and the Masters champion of 1993. Now 60 years old.

So apparently Trump went golfing with longer some time between Election Day 2016 and this dinner on January 23, 2017, and on the golf course longer told Trump about his experience on Election Day in Florida, longer went to vote and he was told that he wasn't eligible to because he's been dead for 50 years because he's German and not a U.S. citizen, but longer looked at other voters in line who he said looked as if they should not be allowed to vote because they've been dead for 50 years.

No one's been dead for 50 years. No one. Boris Karloff has been dead for 50 years. He died February 2nd, 1969. Complications from pneumonia.

Boris Karloff has been dead for months. So Trump's got this idea in his head for longer. People are illegally voting because this German golfer told him so and he's upset that he didn't win more votes than Hillary. So instead of investigating this claim, instead of checking with any election officials, he just starts saying in public, millions of illegal votes.

That is something that is extremely fundamental to our functioning democracy, a fair and free election. Sure. You say you're going to launch an investigation. She's done. What you've presented so far has been debunked. It's been called false. I take a look at the Pew report. I called the author of the Pew report last night, and he told me that they found no evidence it.

And why did he write the report? He said no evidence of voter fraud. Then why did you write the report?

According to Pew report then that Pew report he was mentioning, he was probably confusing it with the study from Old Dominion, which leapfrogged off the survey from Brian Schaffner, which remember has been debunked, which remember, doesn't really matter, because now this lie has been supercharged.

He continues to make this assertion there were somewhere between three and five million voters that voted illegally in the last election.

He's got his spokespeople lying, citing the survey.

I as I said, I think the president has believed that for a while, based on studies, information he has about the body essence lies about voter excuse me, about wiretapping, his repeated lies about those issues.

He does he think he's lying about those issues and you know it. And of course, his friends at Fox News repeat the lie back to him.

President Trump continues to claim that anywhere from three to five million undocumented immigrants across the country voted, costing him the popular vote.

A lot of people think and remember about the president's comment about three to five million votes illegal in this country.

All this because of something that happened on the Internet in 2008. That's like a scandal breaking today because the president thought a Chuck Norris fact was real.

Desi, I just want to break in here and warn our listeners. The next section of the podcast contains several slurs about the Irish and audio taken from a hardcore pornographic film from Japan. What script are you reading from anyway?

Donald Trump doesn't just let this lie go. Oh, no. In May 2017, he does this.

Donald Trump just signed an executive order creating a Commission on Election Integrity to investigate alleged voter fraud. Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will chair it.

That's right. This lie created jobs. Real people kiss their kids goodbye in the morning and went to work in service of this lie. That's crazy, though. People are kissing their kids.

But it turns out this commission was a mistake because after a year of work, the commission disbands. They couldn't find any evidence of widespread voter fraud.

He formed a commission to investigate his lie. That's like lying to your friend about how much you weigh and then insisting on stepping on to a scale.

Actually, that. Oh, yeah. Now that is a good metaphor. And then you step off the scale, kick the guy in the crotch, steal his wallet.

Nope. You lost it again. Trump's Department of Justice was also investigating and was able to find just 19 illegal voters in North Carolina. So three to five million illegal votes in the 2016 election. That's just a lie.

A lie with humble beginnings that worked its way from an Internet survey to a Virginia university to a right wing Web site, to a German golfer, to the president of the United States. Desi Laidig is a producer at these American Life. She recently unfriended me on Facebook. No hard feelings. Desie, I'm Michael Costa. We'll be back next week with more Phibbs falsehoods and fabrications on The Daily Show presents. These American lies. This has been a Comedy Central podcast now.